Spinning Statistics on School Shootings

Q:Have there been 74 school shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Connecticut?

A:No. The group making this claim uses a broad definition that more than doubles the number of school shootings.

FULL QUESTION

I’d really like to see an article on this “74 School shootings since Sandy Hook” stat that’s getting traction today. It seems misleading to me, at the very least. First, it includes grade schools, elementary schools and colleges. It also doesn’t seem to distinguish between a student at college accidentally discharging his gun in his dorm room, a child committing suicide in a school bathroom, two adults playing basketball after school hours who get into a fight that ends in gun violence, a fight between two students that ends in one of them firing a gun, a mass shooting, etc.

Everytown for Gun Safety: Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news accounts. This includes assaults, homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings. Incidents in which guns were brought into schools but not fired there, or were fired off school grounds after having been possessed in schools, were not included.

FactCheck.org has written before about inflated claims of school shootings. In a Dec. 20, 2012, article after the Sandy Hook shooting, we reviewed Rep. Donna Edwards’ claim that “since Columbine, there have been 181 of these school shootings.” Edwards based her claim on information from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which at the time reported that there had been 201 “major school shootings” since 1997. We reviewed the Brady Campaign list and documented 62 “major school shootings” — not 181 — since the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999. For that article, we defined “major school shooting” as any shooting “that resulted in more than one student, teacher or school employee being killed or injured,” since Edwards was referring to mass shootings.

For this new claim, we asked the Brady Campaign for an updated list of “major school shootings.” The Brady Campaign defines “major school shooting” as any incident in which “the shooter was directly linked to the school and at least one person was shot on school property.” It listed 33 school shootings since the Sandy Hook shooting on Dec. 14, 2012, to June 10, 2014.

That reduced the number of school shootings, by the Brady Campaign’s count, to 30.

However, in reviewing the list published by Everytown, we found that there are four incidents that meet the Brady Campaign’s criteria but do not appear on the Brady Campaign’s list. Two incidents, those that occurred at Madison Parish High School in Louisiana and Union University in Tennessee, involved students of the school who were both victims and suspects. Two additional incidents, those at New River Community College in Virginia and Edison High School in California, occurred on campus, and the suspects were students at the school.

Everytown for Gun Safety is, of course, free to use whatever definition of “school shooting” it desires. But we find the group’s methodology overstates the number of school shootings. By our count, as of June 10, 2014, there had been 34 school shootings — not 74 — since the Sandy Hook shooting on Dec. 14, 2012.